Tobiah's Quest

Someone once told me that the best adventures are the ones where you drown in text and have to think hard. Tobiah's Quest isn't one of those — it's more like checking off a few logic puzzles in a world drowning in letters, and if you get stuck, you hit F1 and read the hints. From 1994, it really looks like Windows 3.1 era stuff.

You play in a text window where you read a room description and type a command. GO EAST, LOOK AT THINGS, TAKE KEY — the familiar point-and-click ritual plays out via keyboard here. The world is linear, the puzzles are straightforward with no real flair. Atmosphere? Minimal. The game holds your hand to every objective and constantly tells you what might be useful to do.

Mechanically, Tobiah's Quest is more of a slog than fun. You have to guess the right verb for your command (sometimes it's LOOK, sometimes EXAMINE, you're never sure which), inventory behaves awkwardly, and the game loves refusing actions without explanation. The puzzles aren't intricate, just tedious fetch-quests like grab a backpack, open a chest, show something to someone. Graphics? None. Sound? None either. It's pure text adventure, but without the magic that makes text games enjoyable — no wit, no mystery, no sense of discovery.

You can only remember Tobiah's Quest as one of thousands of similar attempts that vanished back in the eighties and nineties. These kinds of text adventures were loved by German and French studios; here in Czechia (or wherever this came from) they felt more like school projects. The game wasn't bad because it was bold — it was boring because the authors couldn't be bothered to think.

Today you'll play it maybe once, when you've run out of better retro gems and have time to kill. It runs fine in a browser (via DOSBox), but that's its only selling point. If you're craving an authentic taste of nineties tedium, you'll find it here. But feel free to skip it.